Anchor Butter does not give you HIV

This post appears to make a reappearance every few months targeting a different food product. It warns you against eating Anchor butter because of a contamination that occurred at Westbury Dairy. According to the post, a man added his HIV infected blood to the butter during production and claims BBC News has also reported the story.

This is a false claim.

Interestingly, the Anchor butter is produced at Westbury Dairies, which is based in Wiltshire. A representative of the company which owns Westbury Dairies, Arla Foods UK, confirmed to Snopes.com that the post is fake. There is no record of such events on the BBC News website either, leading us to conclude that the entirety of the post is false. 

Those who share this post and others like it seem to be genuinely worried about the possibility of spreading HIV and the linked risk of AIDS. However, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention have clearly explained that HIV cannot be transmitted through food.

"You can’t get HIV from consuming food handled by an HIV-infected person. Even if the food contained small amounts of HIV-infected blood or semen, exposure to the air, heat from cooking, and stomach acid would destroy the virus."

​The only known cases where infection has occurred through food has been where a person has eaten food that has been pre-chewed by a HIV infected person - and even then, the infected person must have blood in their mouth at the time of chewing. This is therefore very rare and should not be a concern for the majority of the population.